The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.
Today, electronic forms having visible elements that can be interacted with are everywhere. Examples include web pages and forms presented by application programs implemented using software as a service (SaaS) techniques. The electronic forms enable directed communication of data having specific formats and thus facilitate data processing. For example, instead of a single narrative question of what the billing address is, an electronic form might instead present several fields corresponding to different portions of the billing address to be filled out. More generally, an electronic form contains one or more hierarchically arranged fields that are used to receive data. The data can be contents, such as a text segment or an image, or other signals, such as a mouse click, which could also lead to additional contents, such as a check for a check box. The hierarchical arrangement typically entails one or more groups of fields, with each group typically identified by a group label and each field possibly accompanied by a field label. For example, the electronic form could have a group of fields for the billing address and a group of fields for the shipping address. The electronic form could thus contain a group label of “Billing Address”, a field label of “City”, and an associated field for entering the city. The field is considered to be associated with the group label and the field label.
Different electronic forms might represent the same data with different hierarchical arrangements. For example, in one electronic form, the shipping address might come before the billing address or after the billing address. In another electronic form, the field label for the field to receive the country information in the billing address might be positioned above the field or to the left of the field.
Given the volume of electronic forms that need to be completed, it would be helpful to have a system that automatically understands which types of data is expected by an electronic form and completes the form without human intervention.